MICCAI 2021 Daily – Wednesday

19 DAILY MICCAI Wednesday Mert Sabuncu can allocate to the conference experience, the more you will get out of it. Also, don’t be shy. I assumed a lot of the more senior people weren’t approachable and it took me a while to connect with them. But now I know that we’re all human, so it just takes saying hi or introducing yourself or texting or emailing them. People are usually responsive. Sometimes they are busy, you just need to understand that, but otherwise people are very responsive. Can you assure participants that if they feel awkward the first or second time, it will change eventually? 100 per cent. This is true for anything, but it is definitely true for a conference like MICCAI. The more you go to these events, the more time you spend amongst people, the more talks you listen to, the more papers you read, the more papers you write, the more talks you give, the more confident you’re going to be in general. There’s a big difference between how comfortable you are at the end of your PhD versus the beginning. At the beginning, everything is new. At first, I didn’t even know how to look at a poster and absorb that information! Now, it takes me 10 seconds to go through a poster, but it’s taken me years to get here. Not everyone will stick with this field and come to this conference as many times as I have, but if you’re going through grad school that’s a span of 3-5 years at least, so during that time, the more you attend these conferences, the more experience you’ll get and the more confident you’ll become. It’s also important to realize that a lot of it is psychological. Imposter syndrome is real and even people at very senior levels suffer with it. It’s important to acknowledge that and try to build up your confidence proactively. How do you build it? By little steps and by communicating. You need to have good mentors and talk to people. I try to instil this in my own students. We talk about how someone feels in their first presentation or their first poster. Just acknowledging that everybody goes through this. None of us are born as Nobel laureates or full professors. It takes time to learn things and build up that confidence. For some people it doesn’t come very naturally. It’s not even strongly correlated with what you know or what you have experienced, it’s just